Streamlining Billing for a Safer Online World: Sift Reduces Time to Bill by 2 Days
- Reduced monthly billing by 2 days
- Easy access to customer usage data
- Repeatable and simplified reporting and forecasting
We now have a solution that does everything for us. There isn't a use case that m3ter has not solved.
In the digital era, we don’t think twice about online shopping for anything from clothes and groceries to high-end technology and furniture. But with online fraud posing a serious threat, each online business has to protect itself and its customers against activities such as account takeover, scams, and payment fraud.
This is where Sift comes in. The comprehensive fraud detection platform is a pioneer of Digital Trust & Safety. Sift was the first company of its kind to use machine learning, processing one trillion events per year for thousands of websites and apps, and improving their fraud detection accuracy by 40%.
With its business growing and reaching unicorn status, Sift’s billing process was becoming cumbersome and challenging. The company offers various usage-based pricing scenarios, tiers, and products, meaning some customers pay separately for all services, others pay in bundles; some are billed at the end of the month, others prepay; some companies are billed individually, others need the charges to be sent to a corporate parent. None of this was automated or easily manageable through Sift’s existing financial platform.
We kept hearing about billing challenges from our sales team, which put a ton of work back on our finance team as soon as invoices went out. Sift is all about creating trust on the internet, and we needed to make sure we had billing software we and our customers could trust.
Sift decided to optimize its billing process to address the challenges facing the finance department and guarantee accurate invoicing for their customers. A clear real-time view of client usage data can now be leveraged as a strategic asset within the sales and customer care teams to engage customers when usage fluctuates.
“There were a lot of issues within the old software,” says Glassic. “We had unexplained discrepancies in our subscription data, there were duplications, and customer usage would be doubled. So we'd have to go in and check everything manually every month.”
Sift considered several options for a new platform and had a wish list that included great support, reporting and analytics, and the flexibility to handle complex pricing. The company also needed automation to put an end to all the manual processes and ensure scalability.
“The goal has always been to put out high quality invoices and I feel so much more confident with m3ter that this is exactly what we're doing,” says Glassic. “We now have a solution that does everything for us. There isn't a use case that m3ter has not solved. And we were told by some of the biggest players in the market that certain things can’t be done, so to hear that m3ter can do it all sounded too good to be true. But it is true.”
m3ter was the only provider that ticked all the boxes and was able to deliver automation, easy reporting, clear customer usage data with near real-time trends, and updates about usage that are easily available throughout the month, not only at the end of the billing cycle. Speeding up processes also helped improve cash flow with invoices being paid sooner.
So far, Sift has reduced its billing period by 2 days without additional time or effort from its employees.
Every month, we were working overtime to get the invoices done and, with m3ter, we don't have that anymore. It's amazing. We've been live for two months and this past month, it was the earliest our invoices have ever gone out—increasing cash flow and bringing in month-end close dates.
Reporting, integrations, and reliable support make anything possible
Apart from faster billing times, Sift is also using m3ter to create reports and integrate with other platforms such as NetSuite and Salesforce.
“The NetSuite integration was really smooth,” says Glassic. “All the bills are pushed into Netsuite from m3ter and are auto sent to our customers. And if something is missing, we can just enter it in m3ter, put the plan in, and it pulls the usage and calculates the bill. Our previous system would not do the calculations for us.”
Sift is working on ensuring that opportunities from Salesforce will create plans and contracts automatically in m3ter. This is a work in progress, but testing has been successful and the team is excited about the move.
“Even not being completely integrated with Salesforce yet, just the setup of the plans and subscriptions in the system was a big timesaver compared to what we were using before,” says Cynthia Jaurigui, Billing Accountant.
But implementations and technical solutions are not everything. The company is also relying on the dedicated support from m3ter, who is committed to learning about Sift’s needs and improving its own performance.
“What has been wonderful about m3ter is that when they see what’s needed, they make it happen,” says Glassic. “Sometimes overnight. They’ve been really responsive and committed to helping us. And so far, there has been nothing that m3ter hasn't been able to provide for us.”
The newfangled reporting capabilities mean that the company’s analytics database now feeds directly into m3ter reports. The finance team can extract the data themselves, with improved cooperation between different departments including engineering, customer success, and sales, with everyone having access to reliable information throughout the month, instead of having to wait until the month was over with their previous setup.
Before, we would get that data from engineering at the end of the month. And now, with the input reporting that's going into m3ter every three days, we're able to extract it and get a head start on things that are unusual.
Continued growth
“There's so much captured in m3ter.” says Glassic. “And it's all reportable now. It's exciting to have a nimble partner that can provide the information we need.”
Sift is working on moving more data into Salesforce that would then be increasingly reportable to customers, providing more visibility into their services and a clearer view of their charges, ensuring an improved experience. The team is also looking forward to more reporting capabilities that are coming soon and customized notifications such as flags for spikes in usage, which will allow Sift’s sales teams to reach out to customers at the right time.
But, perhaps most importantly, the company is now confident that it will be able to keep growing and scaling without fears of more manual processes or overtime for employees.
The scalability of m3ter will support our growth into the future. We've gained so much efficiency and time, and we can trust the data. m3ter has made our revenue process cleaner, quicker, and more efficient. We don't have the stress during month end that we had previously. The whole team feels better.
About Sift
Sift is the leader in Digital Trust & Safety, preventing fraud and abuse through industry-leading technology and expertise. Global brands such as Twitter, DoorDash, and Poshmark rely on Sift to gain competitive advantage in their markets.
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